Gender Wars: Who’s better at science and math?

Perhaps guys do perform better than girls on science and math exams, but the question is whether this is an innate difference or are negative stereotypes that women can’t do well in these areas to blame? University of Texas at Austin Assistant Professor Matthew McGlone has a new study that will be published next month in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology that basically found that college females scored better on standardized tests (in this case, the Vandenberg Mental Rotation Test which looks at spatial reasoning) when they were reminded of their non-gender-associated accomplishments – in the case of the study that they were students at a selective private college – rather than priming them to contemplate their sex. So reminding students of their biological or cultural social identity can impact a test score negatively.

Reminding them of their other achieved social affiliations, let’s think high school level, “you’re in National Honor Society” or “at the city’s best high school” before a test can be good. I’m still left wondering about those kids at poor-performing schools who don’t have positive affiliations. How do you lift them up?

There is a growing field of research from educators and psychologists studying the role of both racial and gender stereotypes in student performance in the hopes of finding some way to even the playing field for all students (yes, I mean specifically women and minorities). My ears always perk up when I read or hear about these sorts of studies. My math, science and analytical scores (all the way from the TAAS to the GRE test) always left my reading/English/verbal scores in the dust, and my aspiration growing up was to work as a research scientist for the CDC (the thought of becoming a writer scared me). I’m a woman, a Hispanic woman, so maybe a negative racial stereotype played into my language abilities growing up.

Reading this study also reminded me of the stir caused by Harvard’s former president Lawrence Summers’ remarks about why women are lagging in the sciences: because innately, men and women have different abilities. Research has shown (and we really don’t need a study to figure this one out) that men and women are built differently – physically, emotionally, mentally. But the way we are socialized or stereotyped certainly make a difference and certainly deserves attention and studying. We’ll never close the achievement gap between different groups of students if we don’t know why they exist and persist.

While on the subject, here are two excellent books that touch on racial stereotypes and how they affect kids’ schooling:

4 Responses

I suspect that like many “measurements” of differences in, let’s call them academic abilities between groups, whether based on gender or race, we are farther from the equality of conditions that would allow true comparisons than we are ready to admit. Too many political arguments are being made that equality has been reached, at least to the point that allows assessment of test results to be indicative of true parameters. This is one of many studies to suggest that this is not yet the case, but how far are we from real equity? They may be subtler than in the past, but the effects of institutional biases are still very powerful in our society, and we still have a long way to go.

I think that is not especially about who is better at what, but that women might tend to not be as interested in science and math (science especially) but are still good at it. I am a female and have many girlfriends who probably aren’t very interested in science, but what about Language Arts?

i don’t know. i mean, i think it’s ingrained in us to think men = science and women = literature (or at least good with words — we use 5 words for every 2 men use to explain something). i’ve never seen a female mad scientist caricature or a male snuggled up with a romance novel. maybe that’s being too simplistic, but pre-conditioning does play a role in lots of things in our lives.